publications: - title: "Towards an Understanding of Shared Understanding in Military Coalition Contexts" author: - name: "Paul R. Smart" link: "http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ps02v/" - name: "Trung Dong Huynh" link: "www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/tdh" - name: "David Mott" link: "https://researchr.org/alias/david-mott" - name: "Katia Sycara" link: "http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sycara/" - name: "Dave Braines" link: "https://researchr.org/alias/dave-braines" - name: "Michael Strub" link: "https://researchr.org/alias/michael-strub" - name: "Winston Sieck" link: "https://researchr.org/alias/winston-sieck" - name: "Nigel R. Shadbolt" link: "http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/nrs/" year: "2009" month: "September" abstract: "Shared understanding is commonly seen as essential to the success of coalition operations, and current research efforts are attempting to develop techniques and technologies to improve shared understanding in military coalition contexts. In spite of this, our understanding of what the term ?shared understanding? actually means is surprisingly poor. In part, this problem is attributable to the difficulty in comprehending the true nature of understanding itself, although confusions also arise about the precise nature of the differences between shared understanding and ostensibly similar constructs, such as shared mental models and shared situation awareness. In this paper, we attempt to improve our understanding of shared understanding by exploring the nature of understanding, situation awareness and mental models. Following Wittgenstein, we suggest that understanding is best conceived of as something akin to an ability, and shared understanding is, we suggest, best conceived of as the sharing of individual forms of understanding by multiple agents. We further suggest that mental models may provide a mechanistic realization for some of the performances that manifest understanding, and that situation awareness should best be seen as a particular kind of understanding, namely a dynamic form of situational understanding. In addition to discussing the nature of understanding and shared understanding, we also discuss their potential relevance to military coalition operations. We propose that shared understanding is important to coalition operations because it contributes to improvements in coalition performance, the optimal use of limited communication assets, and an improved sense of group cohesion, group solidarity and mutual trust." links: "ecs eprints": "http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/17704/" tags: - "meta-model" - "context-aware" - "Meta-Environment" researchr: "https://researchr.org/publication/SmartHMSBSSS09" cites: 0 citedby: 0 booktitle: "3rd Annual Conference of the International Technology Alliance (ACITA'09)" kind: "inproceedings" key: "SmartHMSBSSS09" - title: "Developing an Integrated Trust and Reputation Model for Open Multi-agent Systems" author: - name: "Trung Dong Huynh" link: "www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/tdh" - name: "Nicholas R. Jennings" link: "http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/nrj/" - name: "Nigel R. Shadbolt" link: "http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/nrs/" year: "2004" abstract: "Trust and reputation are central to effective interactions in open multi-agent systems in which agents, that are owned by a variety of stakeholders, can enter and leave the system at any time. This openness means existing trust and reputation models cannot readily be used. To this end, we present FIRE, a trust and reputation model that integrates a number of information sources to produce a comprehensive assessment of an agent?s likely performance. Specifically, FIRE incorporates interaction trust, role-based trust, witness reputation, and certified reputation to provide a trust metric in most circumstances. FIRE is empirically benchmarked and is shown to help agents effectively select appropriate interaction partners." links: "ecs eprints": "http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/9557/" tags: - "empirical" - "rule-based" - "agent based modeling" - "meta-model" - "modeling" - "source-to-source" - "object-role modeling" - "reputation" - "information models" - "Meta-Environment" - "open-source" researchr: "https://researchr.org/publication/HuynhJS04trust" cites: 0 citedby: 0 booktitle: "7th International Workshop on Trust in Agent Societies" kind: "inproceedings" key: "HuynhJS04trust" - title: "Trust in Multiagent Systems" author: - name: "S. D. Ramchurn" link: "https://researchr.org/alias/s.-d.-ramchurn" - name: "Trung Dong Huynh" link: "www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/tdh" - name: "Nicholas R. Jennings" link: "http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/nrj/" year: "2004" abstract: "Trust is a fundamental concern in large-scale open distributed systems. It lies at the core of all interactions between the entities that have to operate in such uncertain and constantly changing environments. Given this complexity, these components, and the ensuing system, are increasingly being conceptualised, designed, and built using agent-based techniques and, to this end, this paper examines the specific role of trust in multi-agent systems. In particular, we survey the state of the art and provide an account of the main directions along which research efforts are being focused. In so doing, we critically evaluate the relative strengths and weaknesses of the main models that have been proposed and show how, fundamentally, they all seek to minimise the uncertainty in interactions. Finally, we outline the areas that require further research in order to develop a comprehensive treatment of trust in complex computational settings." links: "ecs eprints": "http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/9564/" tags: - "interaction design" - "rule-based" - "operating system" - "agent based modeling" - "meta-model" - "design complexity" - "design research" - "source-to-source" - "survey" - "object-role modeling" - "Meta-Environment" - "open-source" researchr: "https://researchr.org/publication/RamchurnHJ04" cites: 0 citedby: 0 journal: "The Knowledge Engineering Review" volume: "19" number: "1" kind: "article" key: "RamchurnHJ04" - title: "Automating Trust Evaluation for Ensuring Information Quality" author: - name: "Trung Dong Huynh" link: "www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/tdh" year: "2009" month: "March" abstract: "Modern warfare's situation awareness and operation planning requires analyzing a vast amount of information, ranging broadly from intelligence reports to data from autonomous sensors. Correctly assessing the credibility of such information in a timely manner is as crucial to decision making as being able to obtain the information in the first place. However, manual information quality assessment is time-consuming and laborious, especially considering the amount of information that modern automated knowledge solutions can deliver. In this paper, we present a novel trust framework called the Personalized Trust Framework (PTF), which can assist military analysts to automate their trust evaluation process, and, as a result, significantly lighten the burden of information quality assessment. In other words, it provides a mechanism for end users to capture their trust reasoning in order for it to be automated by computers. In particulars, a user can specify how he selects a trust model based on information about the subject whose trustworthiness he needs to evaluate and how that trust model is configured. This trust evaluation process is then automated by the PTF making use of the trust models that can be flexibly plugged into the PTF by the user. By so doing, the PTF enable users to reuse and to personalize existing trust models to suit their requirements without having to reprogram them. Finally, this paper demonstrates a simple application of the PTF in automated credibility evaluation to ensure information quality." links: "ecs eprints": "http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/17117/" tags: - "rule-based" - "application framework" - "meta-model" - "modeling" - "reuse" - "data-flow" - "information models" - "context-aware" - "Meta-Environment" - "process modeling" researchr: "https://researchr.org/publication/Huynh09KSCO" cites: 0 citedby: 0 booktitle: "Knowledge Systems for Coalition Operations" kind: "inproceedings" key: "Huynh09KSCO" - title: "An Integrated Trust and Reputation Model for Open Multi-agent Systems" author: - name: "Trung Dong Huynh" link: "www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/tdh" - name: "Nicholas R. Jennings" link: "http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/nrj/" - name: "Nigel R. Shadbolt" link: "http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/nrs/" year: "2006" doi: "http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10458-005-6825-4" abstract: "Trust and reputation are central to effective interactions in open multi-agent systems in which agents, that are owned by a variety of stakeholders, continuously enter and leave the system. This openness means existing trust and reputation models cannot readily be used since their performance suffers when there are various (unforseen) changes in the environment. To this end, this paper presents FIRE, a trust and reputation model that integrates a number of information sources to produce a comprehensive assessment of an agent's likely performance in open systems. Specifically, FIRE incorporates interaction trust, role-based trust, witness reputation, and certified reputation to provide trust metrics in most circumstances. FIRE is empirically evaluated and is shown to help agents gain better utility (by effectively selecting appropriate interaction partners) than our benchmarks in a variety of agent populations. It is also shown that FIRE is able to effectively respond to changes that occur in an agent's environment." links: doi: "http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10458-005-6825-4" tags: - "empirical" - "rule-based" - "agent based modeling" - "meta-model" - "modeling" - "source-to-source" - "object-role modeling" - "reputation" - "information models" - "Meta-Environment" - "open-source" researchr: "https://researchr.org/publication/HuynhJS06jaamass" cites: 0 citedby: 0 journal: "Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems" volume: "13" number: "2" pages: "119-154" kind: "article" key: "HuynhJS06jaamass" - title: "A Personalized Framework for Trust Assessment" author: - name: "Trung Dong Huynh" link: "www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/tdh" year: "2009" doi: "http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1529282.1529574" abstract: "The number of computational trust models has been increasing quickly in recent years yet their applications for automating trust evaluation are still limited. The main obstacle is the diffculties in selecting a suitable trust model and adapting it for particular trust modeling requirements, which varies greatly due to the subjectivity of human trust. The Personalized Trust Framework (PTF) presented in this paper aims to address this problem by providing a mechanism for human users to capture their trust evaluation process in order for it to be replicated by computers. In more details, a user can specify how he selects a trust model based on information about the subject whose trustworthiness he needs to evaluate and how that trust model is configured. This trust evaluation process is then automated by the PTF making use of the trust models exibly plugged into the PTF by the user. By so doing, the PTF enable users reuse and personalize existing trust models to suit their requirements without having to reprogram those models." links: doi: "http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1529282.1529574" tags: - "rule-based" - "application framework" - "meta-model" - "modeling" - "reuse" - "information models" - "Meta-Environment" - "process modeling" researchr: "https://researchr.org/publication/Huynh09acmsac" cites: 0 citedby: 0 pages: "1302-1307" booktitle: "Proceedings of the 2009 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, March 9-12, 2009" editor: - name: "Sung Y. Shin" link: "https://researchr.org/alias/sung-y.-shin" - name: "Sascha Ossowski" link: "https://researchr.org/alias/sascha-ossowski" publisher: "ACM" isbn: "978-1-60558-166-8" kind: "inproceedings" key: "Huynh09acmsac" - title: "On Handling Inaccurate Witness Reports" author: - name: "Trung Dong Huynh" link: "www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/tdh" - name: "Nicholas R. Jennings" link: "http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/nrj/" - name: "Nigel R. Shadbolt" link: "http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/nrs/" year: "2005" abstract: "Witness reports are a key building block for reputation systems in open multi-agent systems in which agents, that are owned by a variety of stakeholders, continuously enter and leave the system. However, in such open and dynamic environments, these reports can be inaccurate because of the differing views of the reporters. Moreover, due to the conflicting interests that stem from the multiple stakeholders, some witnesses may deliberately provide false information to serve their own interests. Now, in either case, if such inaccuracy is not recognised and dealt with, it will adversely affect the function of the reputation model. To this end, this paper presents a generic method that detects inaccuracy in witness reports and updates the witness?s credibility accordingly so that less credence is placed on its future reports. Our method is empirically evaluated and is shown to help agents effectively detect inaccurate witness reports in a variety of scenarios where various degrees of inaccuracy in witness reports are introduced." links: "url": "http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11136/" tags: - "empirical" - "meta-model" - "source-to-source" - "reputation" - "information models" - "Meta-Environment" - "open-source" researchr: "https://researchr.org/publication/HuynhJS05" cites: 0 citedby: 0 booktitle: "8th Int. Workshop on Trust in Agent Societies" kind: "inproceedings" key: "HuynhJS05" - title: "Certified Reputation: How an Agent Can Trust a Stranger" author: - name: "Trung Dong Huynh" link: "www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/tdh" - name: "Nicholas R. Jennings" link: "http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/nrj/" - name: "Nigel R. Shadbolt" link: "http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/nrs/" year: "2006" doi: "http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1160633.1160854" abstract: "Current computational trust models are usually built either on an agent's direct experience of an interaction partner (interaction trust) or reports provided by third parties about their experiences with a partner (witness reputation). However, both of these approaches have their limitations. Models using direct experience often result in poor performance until an agent has had a su±cient number of interactions to build up a reliable picture of a particular partner and witness reports rely on self-interested agents being willing to freely share their experience. To this end, this paper presents Certified Reputation (CR), a novel model of trust that can overcome these limitations. Specifically, CR works by allowing agents to actively provide third-party references about their previous performance as a means of building up the trust in them of their potential interaction partners. By so doing, trust relationships can quickly be established with very little cost to the involved parties. Here we empirically evaluate CR and show that it helps agents pick better interaction partners more quickly than models that do not incorporate this form of trust." links: doi: "http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1160633.1160854" tags: - "empirical" - "meta-model" - "reputation" - "Meta-Environment" - "systematic-approach" researchr: "https://researchr.org/publication/HuynhJS06aamas" cites: 0 citedby: 0 pages: "1217-1224" booktitle: "5th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2006), Hakodate, Japan, May 8-12, 2006" editor: - name: "Hideyuki Nakashima" link: "https://researchr.org/alias/hideyuki-nakashima" - name: "Michael P. Wellman" link: "https://researchr.org/alias/michael-p.-wellman" - name: "Gerhard Weiss" link: "https://researchr.org/alias/gerhard-weiss" - name: "Peter Stone" link: "https://researchr.org/alias/peter-stone" publisher: "ACM" isbn: "1-59593-303-4" kind: "inproceedings" key: "HuynhJS06aamas" - title: "Trust and Reputation in Open Multi-Agent Systems" author: - name: "Trung Dong Huynh" link: "www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/tdh" year: "2006" month: "June" abstract: "Trust and reputation are central to effective interactions in open multi-agent systems (MAS) in which agents, that are owned by a variety of stakeholders, continuously enter and leave the system. This openness means existing trust and reputation models cannot readily be used since their performance suffers when there are various (unforseen) changes in the environment. To this end, this thesis develops and evaluates FIRE, a trust and reputation model that enables autonomous agents in open MAS to evaluate the trustworthiness of their peers and to select good partners for interactions. FIRE integrates four sources of trust information under the same framework in order to provide a comprehensive assessment of an agent's likely performance in open systems. Specifically, FIRE incorporates interaction trust, role-based trust, witness reputation, and certified reputation, that models trust resulting from direct experiences, role-based relationships, witness reports, and third-party references, respectively, to provide trust metrics in most circumstances. A novel model of reporter credibility has also been integrated to enable FIRE to effectively deal with inaccurate reports (from witnesses and referees). Finally, adaptive techniques have been introduced, which make use of the information gained from monitoring the environment, to dynamically adjust a number of FIRE's parameters according to the actual situation an agent finds itself in. In all cases, a systematic empirical analysis is undertaken to evaluate the effectiveness of FIRE in terms of the agent's performance." links: "ecs eprints": "http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12759/" tags: - "empirical" - "rule-based" - "agent based modeling" - "meta-model" - "modeling" - "points-to analysis" - "analysis" - "source-to-source" - "object-role modeling" - "reputation" - "information models" - "peer-to-peer" - "Meta-Environment" - "systematic-approach" - "open-source" researchr: "https://researchr.org/publication/Huynh06" cites: 0 citedby: 0 school: "University of Southampton" type: "PhD Thesis" address: "United Kingdom" advisor: - name: "Nicholas R. Jennings" link: "http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/nrj/" - name: "Nigel R. Shadbolt" link: "http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/nrs/" kind: "phdthesis" key: "Huynh06" - title: "The ART of IAM: The Winning Strategy for the 2006 Competition" author: - name: "W. T. Luke Teacy" link: "https://researchr.org/alias/w.-t.-luke-teacy" - name: "Trung Dong Huynh" link: "www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/tdh" - name: "R. K. Dash" link: "https://researchr.org/alias/r.-k.-dash" - name: "Nicholas R. Jennings" link: "http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/nrj/" - name: "Michael Luck" link: "http://www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/staff/mml/" - name: "Jigar Patel" link: "https://researchr.org/alias/jigar-patel" year: "2007" abstract: "In many dynamic open systems, agents have to interact with one another to achieve their goals. Here, agents may be self-interested, and when trusted to perform an action for others, may betray that trust by not performing the actions as required. In addition, due to the size of such systems, agents will often interact with other agents with which they have little or no past experience. This situation has led to the development of a number of trust and reputation models, which aim to facilitate an agent's decision making in the face of uncertainty regarding the behaviour of its peers. However, these multifarious models employ a variety of different representations of trust between agents, and measure performance in many different ways. This has made it hard to adequately evaluate the relative properties of different models, raising the need for a common platform on which to compare competing mechanisms. To this end, the ART Testbed Competition has been proposed, in which agents using different trust models compete against each other to provide services in an open marketplace. In this paper, we present the winning strategy for this competition in 2006, provide an analysis of the factors that led to this success, and discuss lessons learnt from the competition about issues of trust in multiagent systems in general. Our strategy, IAM, is Intelligent (using statistical models for opponent modelling), Abstemious (spending its money parsimoniously based on its trust model) and Moral (providing fair and honest feedback to those that request it)." links: "ecs eprints": "http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13718/" tags: - "rule-based" - "agent based modeling" - "meta-model" - "modeling" - "points-to analysis" - "analysis" - "model-driven development" - "source-to-source" - "reputation" - "peer-to-peer" - "Meta-Environment" - "open-source" researchr: "https://researchr.org/publication/TeacyHDJLP07" cites: 0 citedby: 0 booktitle: "The 10th International Workshop on Trust in Agent Societies" kind: "inproceedings" key: "TeacyHDJLP07" - title: "FIRE: An Integrated Trust and Reputation Model for Open Multi-Agent Systems" author: - name: "Trung Dong Huynh" link: "www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/tdh" - name: "Nicholas R. Jennings" link: "http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/nrj/" - name: "Nigel R. Shadbolt" link: "http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/nrs/" year: "2004" abstract: "Trust and reputation are central to effective interactions in open multi-agent systems in which agents, that are owned by a variety of stakeholders, can enter and leave the system at any time. This openness means existing trust and reputation models cannot readily be used. To this end, we present FIRE, a trust and reputation model that integrates a number of information sources to produce a comprehensive assessment of an agent's likely performance. Specifically, FIRE incorporates interaction trust, role-based trust, witness reputation, and certified reputation to provide a trust metric in virtually all circumstances. FIRE is empirically benchmarked and is shown to help agents effectively select appropriate interaction partners." tags: - "empirical" - "rule-based" - "agent based modeling" - "meta-model" - "modeling" - "source-to-source" - "object-role modeling" - "reputation" - "information models" - "Meta-Environment" - "open-source" researchr: "https://researchr.org/publication/HuynhJS04" cites: 0 citedby: 0 pages: "18-22" booktitle: "Proceedings of the 16th Eureopean Conference on Artificial Intelligence, ECAI 2004, including Prestigious Applicants of Intelligent Systems, PAIS 2004, Valencia, Spain, August 22-27, 2004" editor: - name: "Ramon López de Mántaras" link: "https://researchr.org/alias/ramon-l%C3%B3pez-de-m%C3%A1ntaras" - name: "Lorenza Saitta" link: "https://researchr.org/alias/lorenza-saitta" publisher: "IOS Press" isbn: "1-58603-452-9" kind: "inproceedings" key: "HuynhJS04"